beanojones
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What rule? Where is it officially stated? By whom?
A rule that is broken by many thousands of people every year is not much of a rule, and it provides no guidance for future decisions.
PADI Instructor Manual says in General Standards: Do not conduct open water dives and Discover Scuba Diving experience dives in caves, caverns, under ice or in any situation where direct vertical access to the surface is not possible.
Millions of people drive drunk every year with no bad outcomes, even though they are breaking the law against drunk driving, so the logic espoused above says that no drunk driving laws are much of a rule, and they provide no guidance for future decisions.
Or if a dive analogy is preferred: most divers dive without computers or tables, and for all but the exceptional cases, nothing bad happens to them. Even worse some people using tabels and computer get bent. Above logic would mean that because many get away with it, rules about it are not needed. Depending on how far one wants to take the reasoning, we could even warp it to say no one should be allowed to use tables or computers because some people using them get bent.
Again arguing by appeal to popularity, against restrictions to overhead envirnments is appealling to an common, but flawed fallacy to 'make' the argument. People do lots of stupid things mostly without consequence. The lack of direct cause and effect is no argument at all against any rule.
---------- Post added July 7th, 2014 at 01:11 AM ----------
This thread should probably should be moved to the Tec forum.
Tech Divers already know the rules, have the training, and gear readiness. Nothing applies to them in terms of "don't go there"*. The tangent on the last few pages comes from the fact that the entire thread was started by someone without tech training asking about etiquette on doing tech dives.